Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Red says I'm a little orthodoxwhich I can't disprove on Wednesdayswhen I pay my weekly one-dollar worshipto the world's worst cone of yogurt.It drips on our copies of Homage to Catalonia,and by the way, we fetishize other fightsin lieu of the ones we couldn't get to or create,for different reasons, of course.

But wait: Today Red saidsomething profound about Starbucks,though I had to goad her into it(she's yet to recognize patienceas my most irritating advantage),but it's fine. States will come to recognizeeach other's governments,

though Red won't have much of one,and I still don't get the men thing,and she's still oblivious tomy Midwest quest for solitude.But it's fine! Wait, Odd-Couple syndrome:Turns out "up your alley"isn't what you think it means.

Chapter Two: Tomorrow, Red fileslagoons of wit-bedizened copywhile I motor around looking for totalitariansand other young American disasters,and I'm sure all of us will get famousif we don't get everything horribly wrongor attempt small careers in hip-hop,

and if we ever lie or play it wrongput that on the list of thingsI'm gonna land on like a Steinway

in the later years,when Red sayswe'll burn down the hurtand wash the ashes together for love,though I still thinklove goes it alone.

Monday, February 27, 2012

It's somewhere in Mayabeque, outside Havana,mounted on the endless roadside:THE LAND THAT PRODUCES NOTHINGPRODUCES ONLY SADNESS.This land, those signs, begging workfor the eternal revolution.No work, no food. No food, no life. So work.

A month later, at my local pizza joint,they work. Just a bland block of capitalismhunched on the corner across fromthe brick inexistence of a was-been gas station.It hangs urgently over one of the ovens:CHECK FOR BUBBLES! THAT'S WHYWE HAVE A BUBBLE FORK!

No reminders say REMEMBER LOVEor LIFE IS SO GOOD becausethe love has always been naturaland the movies too on some afternoonwhen you shouldn't have gone,

and when sadness descendsmy cut of mind never needsinstruction on each ofthe all of eachword,

Sunday, February 26, 2012

The conversation failed, fell openand awoke a long silence.They stared soft at each other. (No snow.)Each on some island of private dissent.He thought of work and terrible failure,she of her work too and the waitfor him to show terrible weakness.

Weakness would be more interesting in a man:a giant plaster figurine held arightby the prettiest needles of glass.

Friday, February 24, 2012

State-sponsored forgetting. The land was cleanand tidied by rage and green as the spring could make it.The partisans held missiles of stone in each hand,the smaller boys sometimes just one. But they will grow.The fuckers one town over had disgraced themselvesand insulted the air with their songs of sociopathiclocal glory. No decent people could be proud,could think themselves so human, they whoinsult our daughters with false mouthsand the hands of their terrible bodies.

The border is invisible, no actually,a barbed-wire fence runs near it. Our townwrapped itself in it to better stop the thought,but the cattle then wandered to every province,and I thought of the time I'd woken upto find my lover alone at the televisiondressed in flames and telling me of the weather.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Her lips unfurl and her mouth is a flame.I am aflame. The advice you gaveis what you couldn't follow.In Paris, the news cut in for a celebrity death:Somebody died of bonheur.I am dead of night and you can be morning.This mourning is convex and a little warmerthan forecasted. It would be.Her lips unfurl and her mouth is a flame.